I can make you hate (31 page)

When mind-controlled computers become a commonplace reality, you’ll have typed and sent that message in the time it takes to stub a toe; as quick as pulling a facial expression, but more detailed, and full of swearwords.

And while your brain might be great at controlling machines, how great are you at controlling your brain? What if, ten years in the future, you’re watching a cartoon on your futuristic 3D computer television, and the cartoon’s got a rabbit in it, and the rabbit’s slightly coquettish and flirty, and the knowing way it flicks that cotton tail as it hops makes you think about sex momentarily, and before you know it, your brain’s retrieved some disgraceful bestial rabbit porn from the very worst corners of the Ultranet, and is relaying it on the display in lurid
ninety-six
-inch holographic guttervision just as your wife and kid come back from the shops? And then, drunk on self-destructive power, your computer-mind takes a four-second video-snapshot of your own child’s horrified gasping face and mischievously scribbles a load of penises and swastikas all over it, and uploads this vandalised looping portrait to your 3D holographic Facebook page accompanied by a headline screaming ‘
WITNESS MY NADIR – JUDGE ME! JUDGE ME! JUDGE ME ONE AND ALL
!’

Let’s face it, if you’re honest, there’s a whole world of shit routinely fizzing and popping around in your head that you wouldn’t want a computer to unquestioningly act on. Remember: when they triumphantly unveil an iPhone that lets you dial your sweetheart simply by thinking about their face, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s wonderful. It’s a slippery slope. Resist the mind probe. Thicken your skull. Staple a doormat around it if necessary. Keep those thoughts trapped inside where they belong. Because if the imp of the mind ever sidesteps the body and gets its hand directly on the steering wheel, humankind can look forward to six months of unpredictable chaos, then doomsday. 

In which tabloid journalists make the world worse, Ed Miliband tumbles into a vortex, and cars are driven too quickly.

Week 396, and the phone-hacking affair continues, prompting onlookers to wonder how much more pus can possibly seep out. Rather than lancing the boil, the official apology seems to have pricked a hole in an entire dimension of fetid, boiling pus, and sent it belching and bubbling into our world.

More arrests. More searches. More claims about who was hacked – celebs, sportsmen, politicians all had their privacy invaded. But let’s not forget the real victims here. What about the tabloid journalists? Not just from the
News of the World
or the
Sun
. All the tabloid journalists. Spare a thought for them.

Because it can’t be easy being a tabloid hack at the best of times. Sure, there’s the camaraderie, the sense of power, the rush of skulduggery, the thrill of feeling like one of the chosen few who can see through the Matrix, but these are illusory compensations, sweatily constructed by your quaking, sobbing psyche in a bid to counterweigh the cavernous downside: the awful knowledge that you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse.

Chances are you’re quite smart. And you probably love to write – or did, once, back then, before … before the fall. Now you’re writing nothing but
NYAHH NYAHH NYAHH
ad nauseam
. You use the only brain you’ll ever have to puke out endless gutfuls of cheap gossip or crude propaganda. Half the time you’re wrecking lives and the other half you’re filling your readers’ heads with nakedly misleading straw-man fairytales. Every now and then something might come along to temporarily justify your existence: a political scoop; a genuine outrage … but do you build on it? No. You retreat to the warm cave of your celebrity chef shag-shocks and your tragic tot death-porn double-pagers: wasting your life actively making the world worse.

I suppose the best way to cope with the dull, constant, pulsing awareness that you’re wasting your life actively making the world worse is to somehow bewitch yourself into believing you’re actively making the world better. That by writing about a footballer’s bedroom exploits you’re fearlessly exposing the ugly truth behind the wholesome public image and blah blah role model blah blah fans’ hard-earned cash blah blah sanctimony blah. Hey – whatever works for you, yeah? Dress as a priest if it helps. We all know you’re just grubbily recounting a sex act for our fleeting amusement, like a radio commentator describing two pigs rutting in a sty.

Another strategy, I guess, would be to focus on the fun of the job, to see it as one long naughty jape. To swap tales about Fleet Street legends of yesteryear and consider yourself a fellow swashbuckling pirate. Hey, what about the time you disguised yourself as a doctor tee hee and the time you blagged your way on to the
Emmerdale
set ho ho and the time you spent three hours rooting through a dustbin hurr hurr. No, please, please, don’t tell us now – save all this for your memoirs:
MY LIFE AS A NON-STOP TITTERSOME RAG WEEK PRANKSTER
.

Successfully forging the belief that tabloid journalism is a worthwhile use of your brief time on this planet must require a mental leap beyond the reach of Galileo. This is one reason why so many tabloid stories are routinely peppered with lies – if their staff didn’t continually flex their delusion muscles, a torrent of dark, awful self-awareness might rush into their heads like unforgiving black water pouring through the side of a stricken submarine, and they’d all slash their wrists open right there at their workstations. The newsroom hubbub would be regularly broken by the dispiriting thump of lifeless heads thunking on to desks. Each morning their bosses would have to clear all the spent corpses away with a bulldozer and hire a fresh team of soon-
to-be
-heartbroken lifewasters to replace the ones who couldn’t make
it, whose powers of self-deception simply weren’t up to the job. Who couldn’t cope with the knowledge that they were wasting their lives actively making the world worse.

And now – on top of all of these trials and indignities, on top of the harrowing leukaemia-of-the-soul their career choice inflicts upon them – now their job has got even harder. Because for a while, at least, wasting your life actively making the world worse was relatively easy. You could pay someone to root through someone’s dustbins. Then, when the early mobiles arrived, you could get a £59 frequency scanner and sit outside a soap star’s flat, surreptitiously recording their calls. And when phones went digital, there was the voicemail wheeze, which made life even easier. You could sit at your desk illegally invading the privacy of strangers just by pushing buttons.

But now, having abused all those tricks, like they abused their talent – not for any noble cause, but to find out which girlband member snogged which boyband member – those easy games are up. And it couldn’t have come at a worse time: with plummeting sales, the need for sensational stories is higher than ever. All of which means all those people wasting their lives actively making the world worse will now have to expend colossal effort in order to do so: like prisoners forced at gunpoint to dig their own graves – but with a rubber shovel.

There is no fate more tragic. Pity them. Pity them hard.

After the piece above was published a former editor of the Sun emailed me to say, ‘How I don’t miss the leukaemia of the soul. Very perceptive observation.’ Yet despite this ringing endorsement, the article didn’t go down too well with some journalists, who found it unfair, sweeping, accusatory, over-simplistic, one-sided, abusive, lofty, self-important, histrionic, condescending, inaccurate, and many other things tabloid journalists clearly aren’t. In fairness I should’ve specified ‘some’ tabloid journalists in the second paragraph, not ‘all’ tabloid journalists. But that wouldn’t have been as funny.

This article was written in the run-up to a national referendum on AV (the ‘Alternative Voting’ system). Chances are you’ve forgotten that even happened, especially if you’re reading this in 2,000 years time, in which case why are you wasting your time reading this? Other books are available.

With not long to go until the AV referendum, the waters are muddier than ever. It’s confusing. One minute the anti-camp claims a vote for AV would benefit the BNP. Then the pro-camp counters by pointing out the BNP are against AV. Therefore, no matter what the outcome, Nick Griffin will both win and lose simultaneously. He’ll exist in an uncertain quantum state, like Schrödinger’s cat. I say ‘cat’. I originally used another word starting with c and ending with t, but the
Guardian
asked me to change it. Suffice to say, Griffin is a massive cat.

It’s depressing to see the campaigns on both sides treating the public with such outright contempt. Political ads have rarely been subtle in the past, but this current slew could insult the intelligence of a silverfish. It’s not so much that they think we’re stupid, but that their attempts to appeal to that perceived stupidity are so stupid in themselves; they’ve created a sort of
self-perpetuating
stupidity whirlpool capable of engulfing any loose molecules of logic within a six-mile radius. They might as well replace every billboard with the words
VOTE LIKE THIS, DUMMY
in four-foot high Helvetica.

The ‘No’ campaigners are the worst offenders. It started with the adverts that pitched the purported cost of a new voting system against the needs of imperilled newborns. A photo of a delicate, salmon-pink baby was accompanied by the words ‘She needs a new cardiac facility – not an alternative vote system. Say NO to spending £250 million on AV. Our country can’t afford it.’ Apart
from the dodgy arithmetic involved in coming up with that figure (the sort of magic maths which involves closing your eyes and repeatedly banging the calculator against your forehead), the idea that we can only have one thing or the other – AV or healthy babies – is such a preposterous argument, even the baby could see through it. And its eyes were covered with placenta. That poster made me resolve, early on, that I would definitely vote Yes to AV, if only as a protest vote against the evil dunderheads who dreamt up the baby campaign.

Having made my mind up, I figured I could then ignore the rest of the campaigning – although in practice it got so noisily stupid, I couldn’t. Recently, they’ve hit on the wheeze of using sport as a metaphor for elections, the idea presumably being that sport has clear winners and losers, and is simple enough for Andy Gray to understand. Different forms of sport show up in most of their recent efforts. There was a TV ad depicting a Grand National-style event in which, thanks to AV, the horse in third place magically finished first. This was unrealistic on two counts: partly because the example they used was impossible, but mainly because all the horses survived.

This was followed by a billboard showing two boxers. One is lying battered and unconscious on the floor – and yet the ref is inexplicably declaring this comatose man the winner. Why? Because, according to the slogan, ‘Under AV the loser can win’. Since boxing matches only involve two people, this doesn’t even work as a wildly strained metaphor. It’s just a lie.

Then some well-known former cricketers popped up on YouTube to moan that AV just isn’t cricket. David Gower said, ‘I’m used to a system in sport – in cricket specifically – where if you win, you win, and it’s as simple as that.’ Cricket? Simple? Any sport in which the commentator routinely says things like, ‘England are currently 120 for 3 and chasing 257 – so with 7 wickets in hand and 17 overs remaining, they need to hit a run rate of 8.1 an over’ is far from bloody simple. Sometimes matches are called
off prematurely thanks to rain, at which point the outcome is decided by the Duckworth–Lewis method – which means the teams’ performance thus far is run through an equation which looks like this:

If Gower thinks that’s simpler than AV, he’s a genius. Certainly smarter than, say, Professor Brian Cox. (To see Cox attempting to grasp the Duckworth–Lewis method, visit this URL: bit.ly/gowerisagenius – I’m not joking.)

Interestingly, if you imagine the political parties are cricket teams and run polling data from the last election through the Duckworth–Lewis equation, Nick Griffin wins the Ashes.

Anyway, just when you thought the No camp had a monopoly on absurd campaigning, the Yes campaign go and upload a video on an absurdly emotive par with the No camp’s baby billboard. In it, a kindly-looking Second World War naval veteran, slathered with hard-earned medals, explains, in a heartbreakingly fragile voice, that he fought the Nazis in the name of democracy – yet, thanks to our current electoral system, despite voting in every general election for the past sixty-six years, his vote has always been ‘confiscated by the system’.

As the camera pans over his medals and heart-rending personal memorabilia, backed with a moody piano soundtrack, he explains that ‘for all the say I’ve had, I might as well have died in the Russian convoys, or on the D-Day beaches, or in the Pacific after that’.

Might as well have died? Thankfully he didn’t, despite having his sense of perspective shot off at Dunkirk. No one’s doubting his sacrifice, or his right to speak his mind, but the Yes campaign should realise that kind of OTT hyperbole is probably best saved for more cartoonish concerns. Like, say, the No campaign. Or newspaper columns by arseholes such as Richard Littlejohn. Or me.

This was a set of mock TV listings written to commemorate the marriage of William and Kate. Just in case you hadn’t guessed. Hey, I don’t know how clever you are. You could be an absolute bloody idiot for all I know.